After 20 years in fashion, the 'greatest model who ever lived’ has chosen to
reveal how terrible it has all been for her

Kate Moss isn’t known for weighty pronouncements, which, given the standard of the light ones, may be just as well. The world’s most famous model – an accolade she shows no sign of relinquishing at 38 – has long preferred to let the pictures do the talking. Occasionally though, it can be useful to share confidences, and such a moment has arrived with the publication of a book to mark her 20-plus years in the business.

What comes across from the interview she has given to the latest edition of Vanity Fair is how poorly understood this south London barmaid’s daughter really is. The idea that being rich, beautiful and fawned over by fashion houses, magazine editors and famous photographers is something to envy gets knocked on the head in a few heartbreaking sentences.

Kate reveals that she is so insecure that “I don’t want to be myself, ever,” and says that as a 16-year-old she was coerced into taking her clothes off for the shoot that made her name, and had a nervous breakdown a year later. She carried on (“I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it”) only to find herself accused of glamorising heroin and anorexia.

The real culprit, she says, was hunger. Earning a crust in the fashion trade was one thing. Laying your hands on one was another. “You’d get home from work and there was no food. You’d get to work in the morning and there was no food. Nobody took you out for lunch when I started. Carla Bruni did once. She was nice. Otherwise, you don’t get fed.”

Thus reduced to a state of sunken-eyed hollowness, Kate found she had created a signature “waif” style that quickly replaced the old, relatively curvy look of the 1980s. Vanity Fair doesn’t explore the mystery of why other models managed to grab a sandwich while Kate couldn’t, instead moving on to the next phase of misery, precipitated by her being dumped by Hollywood actor Johnny Depp.

Kate and Johnny were quite an act. Furniture sailed through the air, restaurants resounded to the sound of their rows. On one occasion, when police were called to a New York hotel, they discovered the couple sitting amid a pile of debris, which Depp claimed had been caused by a giant armadillo he had found hiding in the wardrobe. There was no sign of the beast on the scene, and soon no sign of Johnny either. When he finally threw in the towel and went home to his mum, Kate was heartbroken.

“There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me,” she laments. “Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said. Like, if I said: 'What do I do?’ he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust. Nightmare. Years and years of crying. Oh, the tears!”

Oh, the unfairness of it all. Corinne Day, who took the risqué pictures for The Face that propelled a teenage Ms Moss to fame, is no longer alive to defend herself against the charge that: “…they were like: if you don’t do it, we are not going to book you again. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry, then come out and do it.”

And while Kate may protest that the heroin-chic label was unjustified, because “I had never even taken heroin”, there have been years of drug and drink abuse culminating in an infamous front page photograph of her chopping up lines of cocaine in a London recording studio where her then boyfriend, the smacked-out rock calamity Pete Doherty, was making an album.

Can it really be this grim at the top of the fashion ladder? Or has Ms Moss’s lack of expertise in conveying anything other than the most prosaic thoughts on life and work let her down when it matters?

There is plenty in her story to celebrate. Twiggy calls her “simply the greatest model who has ever lived”, and her longevity is unparalleled in a business where, almost by definition, tastes change with dizzying speed. By parading her imperfections, she helped free fashion from its stylised self-constraints and developed an uncanny appeal – which she has never lost – to the ordinary clothes buyer. “Women care about and connect with her in a way that they do with no other model,” says a London fashion editor. “She has that chink of ordinariness, she’s accessible and she convinces women that if they buy something it might just give them a sniff of her allure.”

She was talent-spotted at the age of 14, while passing through New York’s JFK airport, by Sarah Doukas, the founder of the Storm modelling agency. At 5ft 8in, bandy-kneed, snaggle-toothed and possessed of a raucous Croydon accent, she was never going to displace the queens of the catwalk. But her looks had a peculiar ability to adapt to different moods and styles that kept her presence fresh and fascinating.

Through the fog of tobacco smoke that tends to envelop her, you can spot signs of a woman tiring of the rackety life she has led for so long. Last year she married fellow south Londoner, Jamie Hince, the 43-year-old lead guitarist with the Kills, a band enigmatically described by one critic as “rock’n’roll’s best kept secret”. The pair live between a £7.5 million house in Highgate and a 17th-century Cotswold farmhouse, with Kate’s 10-year-old daughter, Lila, from her relationship with journalist Jefferson Hack.

She tells Vanity Fair that she doesn’t go out to clubs any more, “I’m actually quite settled,” and Jamie’s friends say that he is loving and supportive and makes Kate truly happy. It would be tempting to think of her as a survivor of the fash-and-trash of supermodel Babylon, except that she appears to have no intention of retiring.

Her new book consists almost entirely of pictures and at £50 a time is designed more for coffee tables than disclosure. One day, perhaps, she will write it all down, and even remember the good things.